Posted on 03/06/2011 4:04:06 AM PST by raccoonradio
Howie thread for the week starting with his Sunday Herald column. Romneycare? No way, man, I want Howiecar(r)e-- free lipo, dental work, lasik eye...but I'd need a huge talk show and ad deals first
Sun column ping
No Rx for Mitt Romney’s Bay State headache
By Howie Carr | Sunday, March 6, 2011 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
Photo
Photo by Jim Cole
The good news for Willard Mitt Romney is that his religion won’t knock him out of the Republican race for president next year.
The bad news is, he’s got an even bigger problem now than the magic underwear jokes — Romneycare.
“That’s the question he has to address,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H) was saying Friday afternoon. “Not just in New Hampshire, but nationwide.”
You know how big a headache this is when even Mitt’s highest-profile supporters are dodging brickbats over the chaos that is Massachusetts health care.
On Friday, Sen. Scott Brown was halfheartedly trying to defend Romneycare, which he supported as a state senator in 2006 — one of the votes he never seemed to mention during his 2010 Senate race. A caller to my radio show was working Brown over, asking him about the 54,000 Massachusetts residents who’ve been fined for the crime of having no dough to buy the health insurance that illegal aliens still get for free. Sen. Brown didn’t get where he is by defending the indefensible.
“Hey,” he told the caller, “I voted against that fining mechanism.”
Mitt keeps trying to explain how it seemed like such a good idea at the time. But Romneycare follows him around like a dark cloud over his head, just the way Chappaquiddick haunted Ted Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign. If only those rascally Democrats hadn’t ruined it, Mitt keeps saying, as the crowd uneasily makes its way toward the exits.
No, Mitt says, really, I mean it, seriously, please, come back . . .
As Ralph Waldo Emerson once put it, “The louder he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review pointed out this week that Mitt’s primary base in 2008 was rich people. Yesterday, before he jetted off to New Hampshire, Mitt was on his real home turf — Palm Beach, Fla., speaking behind closed doors to the Club for Growth at the five-star Breakers Hotel.
Palm Beach — in 2008 Mitt had a fund-raiser at the gated mansion of one of the Koch brothers, just up Barton Avenue from the posh Episcopal church where Donald Trump got married on TV. This election cycle Mitt can have his Palm Beach time at the home his lieutenant governor, Muffy Healey, just bought for $17 million cash.
After addressing the Club for Growth, Mitt spoke last night in Bartlett, N.H., to the Carroll County Republicans. Bartlett is the home of Attitash (Mitt’s ski chalet is in the much tonier Park City, Utah) and Story Land. Carroll County is thick with the kind of Republicans who’ve never warmed up to Mitt, except for that one election for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, when he drew the hapless Shannon O’Brien in the final.
An old putdown of a politician was to say that he reminds every woman of her first husband or worst boyfriend. Now the joke is that Mitt Romney reminds every worker of the boss who fired him. When the New York Post, in a devastating story about Bain Capital, describes Mitt as a “working class zero,” you definitely have a class problem.
Is it too soon for Muffy to throw a fund-raiser for Mitt at her new mansion in Palm Beach?
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1321340
By the time Howie gets all buffed up for his next contract talk, he will be unmarketable. You can turn off the radio for the first 15 minutes of his show and not miss anything.
I know where Olsen Cadillac is already, Howie.
I wish there were somebody else on in that time slot.
Howie’s show has become really weak and boring over the past 6 months - he spent TWO entire shows (last Thursday and Friday) talking about compensation paid to board members of non-profit Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Boring.
Howie has a face for radio, and it’s even more so, after his latest surgery.
Hey the HC piece is about the Myth not Howey Carr, you 3 sound just like the union flaks that swarm to every HC piece at the Boston Herald. HC comparing MythCare to Red Teddy’s drowning is perfect analogy for the anchor around the neck...for Willard, Jr!
Yeah, that’s me...union flak! LOL
Howie’s column in the Herald is a must read for me. He’s good when he has to keep it under 1000 words.
Howie has forgotten more about Massachusetts’ politics than most of us ever learn in the first place. He’s also very charming on the book-signing circuit.
But Howie’s daily radio show is becoming overloaded. At least he keeps the callers moving, and if you can time it just right, there are about 20 minutes every hour that are really worth listening to.
Union flak???? I know what you mean about the commenters on the Herald board. But I challenge you to a duel; meet me at the Frogmore International Airport on the second Tuesday next week.
That is not fair. Howie’s “ugliness” —and what destroyed
his ratings— is his support for Milt Romney and Milt’s
trained lying, deceiving trained toadie, Scott Brown.
I thought Bladensburg was the place for duels?
Seems that both Howie and the Herald are both turning against Brown-stain and Mittens.
I like it.
Is Howie Carr getting ready to leave WRKO, very soon?
He’s been hinting at it more and more —”I have to look good for job interviews”— but keep in mind his contract runs till either Sept. or Nov. of 2012. It was renewed for 5 years in late 2007. If he can get legal help to get out of it early...but so far no luck.
WTKK has supp. said they aren’t interested but I bet they are. WBZ, I would doubt (no room, maybe too extreme for them). WXKS Talk 1200, possibly, but who knows what money will be bandied about. Perhaps he may have to settle with going back to RKO, and perhaps they’ll “lowball” him but he may have to take what he’s got.
Keep in mind conserv. talk radio in Boston is taking its lumps lately at least in ratings (not sure about earnings;
a station may not nec. do well in ratings to make a little money). Not long ago WRKO was getting 3.7 per cent of the audience in 25-54 yr olds; now it’s 0.8. WTKK—1.8.
Talk 1200— 0.1....now they use Personal People Meters (think I mentioned before) and can detect if people tune out after just one segment rather than giving them credit for listening to the whole show.
If ratings and earnings don’t improve, let’s say Howie may wind up somewhere but perhaps at lower salary. He’d like to jump but times are tough. If RKO still gave him the best deal he might bite the bullet and stay but who knows.
I will say this: if Clear Channel (1200) takes him they may syndicate him to stations they own in Manchester (610),
Worc. (580) and Prov (920), but not necessarily live. All fairly big stations. We’ll see.
Wed column ping
Exec’s golden parachute leads to hard landing
By Howie Carr | Wednesday, March 9, 2011 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
Photo
Photo by Ted Fitzgerald
It’s all about taking the public payroll private. Period.
Who does Blue Cross Blue Shield think they’re kidding with this latest namby-pamby statement about paying a future Wal-Mart greeter named Clueless Cleve Killlingsworth $11 million to leave quietly after losing $149 million.
That’s not welfare, it’s corporate welfare?
The Blues don’t like being a “public charity” anymore because their annual financial statements are posted on Attorney General Martha Coakley’s Web site. It’s public information. How do you think the Herald discovered how much the board’s bandidos were grabbing?
Busted, the board now says there are “conflicting expectations about who we are.”
Not if you go to the AG’s Web site and click on “Non Profits & Charities.” When you get to “Annual Filing Document Search,” click on the sixth option – “PC—IRS 990.” Read it and weep.
This battle to keep public payrolls private is a recurring theme in the hackerama. Think Billy Bulger at UMass, or the “quasi-public authorities” that have been stonewalling the Herald for years.
I told you last week about Paul Guzzi, who made $84,463 on the board and another $429,600 at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.
How about Gloria Larson, she of the $76,400 payout from the ratepayers? As president of Bentley University (another “public charity” on the AG’s Web site), this RINO is grabbing $560,325 a year. Helen Drinan is the president of Simmons College, good for $84,232 on the board and another $173,427 base salary at the college plus a $29,000 bonus.
Remember Ralph Martin II, former district attorney, now at Northeastern University as “senior vice president” in addition to being a Blues board member. His new salary isn’t posted yet on the attorney general’s Web site, so Northeastern stonewalled me, didn’t even return a phone call to say “no comment” when I asked about his salary. Don’t you think Blues would love to pull a Northeastern, as it were, the next time some reporter calls up asking about an eight-figure payout to a PC caricature and Democrat Kool-Aid drinker?
Now that their hands and feet both are caught in the cookie jar, the Blues issue a statement saying: “Executive compensation generally has gotten too high.”
Or, as the late baseball-club owner Bill Veeck used to put up, “It’s not the high cost of talent that’s ruining the game, it’s the high cost of mediocrity.”
And now, paying a moron $11 million has ruined the Blues’ very profitable non-profit scam.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1322012
Howie has talked about going to Florida permanently, so perhaps he will find a gig in FL - the rest of us could probably live stream him.
Fri column ping. btw as I post this it’s 3:40 am and I have Fox News Channel on in background—huge 8.9 earthquake hits off coast of Japan, perhaps the 7th most powerful on record; tsunami has hit Japan and is expected to hit Hawaii at about 3 am THEIR time. Stay tuned.
Public TV beating is must-see
By Howie Carr | Friday, March 11, 2011 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
I used to work for Ch. 2. No really, I’m not kidding. Two days a week, way back in 1989.
As soon as I was hired, the Globe began urging all their moonbat readers to withhold some of their contributions to WGBH until I was fired for the terrible crime of uncovering too much about Mike Dukakis’ hackerama.
The Globe’s odd boycott campaign fit in nicely with the very well-balanced front-page series they’d been writing about me and my gang — Poisoned Politics, they called it.
So I was fired off WGBH’s “Ten O’Clock News.” A couple of years later, WGBH was told by the gangsters at the State House that if the station wanted its annual one-day liquor license for their biggest fund-raiser, it would have to get rid of the whole “Ten O’Clock News.”
They canceled the newscast. One thing about these public-broadcasting types — they’re all stand-up guys.
So I’m really enjoying this week’s implosion of NPR/ PBS/CPB or whatever you want to call it. It couldn’t be happening to a nicer bunch of trust-funded, Birkenstock-clad limousine liberals.
What a gig those pampered pukes have enjoyed. When I worked at Ch. 2, they were still using two-man camera crews, years after every other TV station in Boston had cut down to one. Years later, I remember sitting in the WBUR green room and listening to the show — on a Bose Wave radio. Bose!
When Air America started, people asked me, will it succeed? And I always said, why do moonbats need a second network, especially on the rotten AM band, when they already have their own taxpayer funded ultra-left-wing FM network?
Take this guy Ron Schiller, brought down by a couple of palpably fake Arabs. Went to Cornell, naturally, just like his boss Vivian Schiller, and of course Keith Olbermann.
This Ivy League liberal doesn’t mind lumping all Tea Party people together as racists and xenophobes. And he agrees with the fake Arab who tells Schiller that he finds “a little bit less Jew influence” at NPR.
Schiller, the liberal, agrees, adding there are few Zionists “even among funders. I mean it’s there in those who own newspapers, obviously, but no one owns NPR.”
What newspapers could he possibly be referring to? The ones that vehemently support NPR’s First Amendment right to slur conservatives with conservatives’ own tax dollars?
I can’t wait for the next batch of Jim O’Keefe’s NPR videos. Wouldn’t it be a shame if WGBH ends up owned by the dollar-a-holler crowd, you know, the people Schiller calls “seriously, seriously racist.” Takes one to know one, I guess.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1322549
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